How the War on Terror Enabled Chinas Surveillance Dystopia

The U.S. has failed to achieve its missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the War on Terrors legacy lives on in nearby western China.

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Twenty years after 9/11, the U.S. has failed to achieve its missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the War on Terrors worst legacy lives on in nearby western China, where the Communist Party has erected a vast surveillance system.

Some 11 million people, mostly Muslim minorities from the Uyghur and Kazakh ethnic groups, live under a system of total control, their every move monitored by facial recognition cameras and artificial intelligence. About one-tenth of the population has been taken away to concentration camps for imaginary terrorist crimes, where they undergo indoctrination, brainwashing, and torture.

The U.S. has roundly condemned Chinas persecution of the Uyghur people. But during the course of researching my book The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into Chinas Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, I learned how a political maneuver the U.S. made following 9/11 allowed a major escalation in Chinas designation of the ethnic group as an enemy element in Chinese society.

Many of them were wonderful, sweet people. They clearly werent terrorists who had some vendetta against the U.S., Abbas told me.

Another month passed, but still the Uyghurs were held in their cells. The U.S. government wasnt sure what to do with them. Since they were held extra- judicially under the Defense Departments improvised label of enemy combatant, their detention had no grounding in any American law or the Geneva Conventions. Consequently, no legal procedure existed to determine where and how to release them.

The legal limbo continued as, behind the scenes, American diplomats tried to arrange deals with other countries to grant the Uyghurs asylum as refugees. They werent welcome in America, where members of Congress didnt want Guantanamo terrorists to be resettled in their districts.

In May 2006, after 5 of the 22 men had been imprisoned in Guantanamo for 3 years, those 5 were resettled in Albania, the only country that would take them in.

The five people accepted by Albania are by no means refugees, but terrorist suspects of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, declared a Chinese government spokesman four days after the release. It has a close relationship to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Communist Party had a hot list of threats to China, on which were the five poisons: democracy agitators, Taiwan supporters, Tibetans, the Falun Gong spiritual group, and Muslim Uyghur terrorists.

Meanwhile, 17 Uyghurs languished in Guantanamos highest-security compound, Camp 6, nicknamed the Tomb. It was a place so dark and dank that its inmates clamored and applauded when the sun came over the prisons single rooftop window.

Finally, in 2009, after seven years in American captivity, 6 of the 17 remaining Uyghurs were resettled in Palau, a tiny Pacific island, while the remaining captives were resettled in Slovakia, El Salvador, Bermuda, and elsewhere. These were the only places that would take them, but only after the United States promised to pay $93,333 per man, to help cover each Uyghurs housing and living expenses. Feeling unwelcome and not at all at home, most of them gave up their newly appointed abodes and later moved to Turkey.

But China had what it needed. The decision to lock up the Uyghurs at Guantanamo Bay, with no evidence of a terrorist plot, helped China justify its treatment of the Uyghurs. It painted them as a terrorist time bomb that needed to be defused through heavy-handed measures.

And now, China justifies the surveillance of the Uyghurs by citing the terrorist threat. China sees enemies everywhere and treats them accordingly. Using artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology, and old-school policing tactics, its erected the most invasive surveillance dystopia ever seen in the western region of Xinjiang. You cant uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops one by one, a party official said, explaining the dragnet strategy. You need to spray chemicals to kill them all.

Adapted from The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into Chinas Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain. Copyright 2021. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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